While congratulating Steve Levitt for winning the John Bates Clark medal for being the best young (i.e. sub-40) economist in the world, Brad DeLong posts a list of the previous 27 winners of the award. The prize has been awarded every two years since 1947 except, for some reason, in 1953. It’s not quite best under 40, because by rule no one gets awarded it twice. So it’s best non-winner under 40. Two things about the list stand out.

First, Levitt is in pretty good company. Samuelson, Friedman, Tobin, Arrow, Solow, Becker, Stiglitz, Krugman, Summers, just to name a few. For those who are unfamiliar with these scholars’ work, Brad goes into some detail about their many, no many many, virtues. I wonder if we had a similar prize in philosophy we’d be able to look back at the list after 50 years and be pleased with the list, or whether it would contain a large number of flame-outs who never lived up to potential, and gaps for people who rose to prominence after 40.

Second, the list is all male. Analytic philosophy has done a very poor job over the years in attracting and keeping bright women. This failing is especially galling since the disciplines closest to ours, non-analytic philosophy on one end and linguistic and cognitive sciences on the other, do not have a similar shortcoming. As far as I can tell, the trouble starts as early as the undergraduate years. I wonder how many analytic programs have more female than male concentrators. I suspect (though I don’t have the data at hand to verify this) not a lot, even at schools where there are many more female than male undergraduates. And things get progressively worse in graduate schools and in the profession. It was particularly noticable at the Rutgers Epistemology conference how few women there are in epistemology, though I think that’s a particularly bad area. Conferences that are less focussed on a single area, or generally have a younger crew (or, like this one, both) tend to be more balanced. Still, having said all that, I’d like to think that had we had a similar prize in philosophy after 50 years the list of winners wouldn’t be all male. Would it? We’re not as bad, in this respect, as the economists. Are we?

Apropos of approximately nothing said above, I think it’s pretty neat that one can be a prize-winning scholar in part in virtue of having written papers on corruption in sumo wrestling and violence in hockey. Sadly, Levitt’s papers on these topics (cited here) are not available online, so I can’t find some snappy violent sumo hockey quotes to show what a fine scholar he is.